Collect practical info on deployment experience of various use cases

[gotom22]

For outside end-users of this platform a first consideration may be how much effort it will take to set up the platform locally, maybe customize it. What skill sets are required? etc.

As this will be very difficult to answer in general terms, it may be helpful to have some template where previous users could report their experience with earlier deployments (as in here ).

Ultimately, it should help answer questions like:

• how much should I budget to get this up and running?
• should I give this a try if I have 300 CS undergraduate hours available?
  etc.

[shankari]

@asiripanich @PatGendre @stephhuerre @lefterav @xubowenhaoren I think you have the most recent deployments; any feedback for @gotom22?

If we get enough replies, I can put them into a template similar to the deployment template.

[asiripanich]

From our experience, how much work you need to put into this really depends on your goal. If you just want to passively collect travel diary WITHOUT any user feedback then it is pretty straight forward. You just need to make sure your users know how to install the app, give the right permissions so the app can work properly, and keep the app running in the background. 300 CS hours should be enough to setup a data collection using the master branch of emission server and phone. The other branches have more functionalities such as external survey integration (LimeSurvey, Qualtrics, XLSform), beautiful UIs, and etc. So you probably need more man hours to learn and explore those features.

But overall, the lead developer is very active in this community plus the fabmob team so you won't be alone when there is a problem that you can't solve. ;)

Overall experience: A+

[PatGendre]

Hi, I agree with @asiripanich , the effort really depends on the goals, and on the whole it is great software with a good roadmap:-)
For the fabmob project in 2019, the goal was just to submit the application to 50-100 users interested in this kind of mobility tracking applications, and get their feedback (+ hopefully that some of the testers who go further and deploy their own instance of the app! this has been the case for at least 2 of them).
Our experience is that the application is working well for a few tens of users, but we recommend that the users get a little onboarding session before using the app, because there can be a few reasons why the data collection could not work well, so they'd better have some prior explanations.
Also, as for the correctness of the mobility data collected, e-mission seems to work better when the is not (for us in France, we encounter more trip/mode detection error in dense Paris than in smaller cities such as Aix-en-Provence or Nantes).
If you are interested, the deliverables of the projects are in French but automated translation works well, and the summary of the evaluation report has been already translated to English.

Our budget for the tests was 70k€ for ca 6 months, including time for understanding how the software works (thanks to @shankari ;-), deploying it, adding a few features, managing a CS student internship work, contacting and discussing with users, writing deliverables and doc, filing issues.
You can certainly do useful things with less, especially in a university context.
It is certainly possible to deploy the app for CS undergraduates in a few hours, especially if they don't modify the app and work more on the back-office / data analysis side.